Contra Trump

Over the years, China Heritage has have noted some of the discomforting parallels between the histories of modern China and America. We have pursued our parallax bilateralism in the spirit of what I think of as ‘Larrikin Sinology’ — the wary study of a serious subject undertaken in an irreverent mood.

We first gazed through our Sino-American lens with the publication of A Monkey King’s Journey to the East on 1 January 2017 on the eve of Trump’s inauguration as president. During that first term, we commented on the ways that both Offical America and Official China twist modern history to serve their needs — see Mangling May Fourth 2020 in Washington and Mangling May Fourth 2020 in Beijing — and observed that:

Those of us who are inextricably involved with both of those nations while living, for the most part, on the periphery of these cheek-by-jowl empires, have long witnessed a decades-long ‘apache dance’.

In the wake of Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020, we launched Spectres & Souls — Vignettes, moments and meditations on China and America, 1861-2021. This was a yearlong discussion in which we suggested that many of the spectres and shades, as well as the enlivening souls and lofty inspirations, that asserted themselves both in China and the United States in 2021 could fruitfully be considered in the context of the 160-year period starting in 1861. In November that year, the successful Xinyou Coup 辛酉政變 at the court of the Manchu-Qing dynasty that had ruled China for two centuries ushered in a short-lived period of rapid reform, one that, in many respects continues to this day, even as it falters. While, in February 1861 on the other side of the Pacific Ocean seven slave-owning states broke with the Union that had been established under the Constitution of 1787, resulting in a four-year civil war. The successful conclusion of that war saved the Union, but the failure of the subsequent era of Reconstruction had profound ramifications for the state of that union, and the United States of America generally.

Our series Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium was launched in November 2024, following Donald Trump’s second electoral victory. Given the haunting parallels between Trump’s USA and Xi Jinping’s Chinese Republic we believe that it is time for a new academic and journalistic analytical approach to the Sino-American conundrum. We’ll call it ‘Whataboutism Studies’ and it explores how Horseshoe Theory provides a useful perspective on the bilateral apache dance. The theory suggests that the extreme right — in this case ‘American Fascism’ — and extreme left — China’s state socialism bend toward each other like the ends of a horseshoe.

Responding to Noah Millman’s thesis about the four junctures in America’s constitutional history, we would note the impact of four coups in post-1949 Chinese affairs. They are:

1966 — when Mao Zedong overturned the party-state on the pretext of saving the nation from Soviet-style revisionism;
1976 — the Huairentang Coup when key leaders of the Maoist government were arrested and the pre-1966 old guard were restored to power to lead a decade of economic (and tentative political) reform;
1989 — when Deng Xiaoping and his fellow post-Mao gerontocrats overthrew the head of the Party and toyed with a three-year-long counter-reform; and,
2012 — when Xi Jinping, who would soon become head of the party-state-army, carried out a rolling bureaucratic coup against the state, installed himself as a Chairman of Everything and engineered a position of terminal tenure.

In short, this is a story of Revolution, Reform, Reaction and Restoration. (For more on the ‘Four Rs’, see Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium.)

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America’s Empire of Tedium

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Contra Trump

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